Posts Tagged ‘systems thinking’
“Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides”*…
Regular readers will have deduced that I am something of a techno-optimist. While I worry that human misapplication (exploitation) of new technologies could create new dangers and/or further concentrate wealth and power in too few hands, I believe that emerging tech could– should– help humanity deal with many of its gravest challenges, certainly including climate change. At the same time, I am disposed to thinking about large issues/problems systemically.
Rianne Riemens shares neither of my enthusiasms; she sounds a critical note on techno-optimism, systems thinking– and more specifically, on the application of the latter to the former…
Today, American tech actors express optimistic ideas about how to fix the Earth and halt climate change. Such “green” initiatives have in common that they capture the world in systems and propose large systemic, and mostly technological, solutions. Because of their reliance on techno-fixes, representatives of Silicon Valley express an ideology of ecomodernism, which believes that human progress can be “decoupled” from environmental decline. In this article, I show how “whole-systems thinking” has become a key discursive element in today’s ecomodernist discourses. This discourse has developed from the 1960s onwards – inspired by cybernetic, ecological and computational theories – within the tech culture of California. This paper discusses three key periods in this development, highlighting key publications: the Whole Earth Catalog of the 1960s, the Limits to Growth report in 1972 and the cyberspace manifestoes of the mid 1990s. These periods are key to understand how techno-fixes became a popular answer to the climate crisis, eventually leading to a vision of the world as an ecosystem that can be easily controlled and manipulated, and of technological innovation as harmless and beneficial. I argue that “whole-systems” thinking offers a naive and misleading narrative about the development of the climate crisis, that offers a hopeful yet unrealistic perspective for a future threatened by climate change, built on a misconception of Earth as a datafied planet.
In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (Citation2023) venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argues why we should all be techno-optimists, especially if we are worried about the future impact of the climate crisis. According to Andreessen, promoting unlimited technological progress is the only option: “there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment”. If we generate unlimited clean energy, we can improve the natural environment, whereas a “technologically stagnant society ruins it” (Andreessen, Citation2023). This is possible, he writes, because technologies enable processes of dematerialization and will eventually lead to material abundance. And, “We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence—an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system” (Andreessen, Citation2023). The manifesto thus conceptualizes technology as immaterial and the capitalist economy as an evolutionary system: it presents techno-fixes as a harmless form of environmental action, and economic growth as an inevitable process that political powers should not interfere with.
The “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is an example of a form of techno-optimism that places full trust in the potential of capitalist tech companies to help humanity “innovate” its way out of a climate crisis. Andreessen (Citation2023) cites historical figures including Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, Douglas Engelbart and Kevin Kelly as the inspiration for his manifesto, showing that the work of these figures and their communities is being remixed and reappropriated into the future visions of contemporary techno-optimists. In this article, I analyse how the belief in the environmental potential of techno-fixes is engrained in the ideology and history of “Silicon Valley” and is discursively constructed through a language of “whole-systems thinking”. I use the concept of whole-systems thinking as a lens to study how simplified notions taken from whole-systems theory and cybernetics played and still play a key role in techno-environmental discourse in the post-war era in the United States. I zoom in on three key events that help explain the origins and evolution of popular whole-systems thinking: the Whole Earth Catalog community led by Stewart Brand in the 1960s, the Limits to Growth report by the Club of Rome in the 1970s and the cyberlibertarian community in the 1990s. I will show how a new language emerged that used simplified notions of systems-thinking to promote the idea that technology would help understand, manage and save a planet in peril.
Through a discourse analysis of primary sources and literature review I present a critical reading of these events in the light of today’s techno-optimistic environmental discourse. My corpus exists of a number of primary sources, including the aforementioned “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (2023), Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., Citation1972), editions of the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly, Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996), texts by Kevin Kelly (Citation1998) and Stewart Brand (Citation2009) and An Ecomodernist Manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al., Citation2015). I have discursively analysed these sources for their discussion of systems thinking as well as environmental concerns. By analysing how whole-systems thinking became a popular way of addressing environmental issues, I aim to provide a “post-war genealogy” (Pedwell Citation2022) of the term and critique today’s promises about how tech can save the climate. As Johnston (Citation2020) has argued, tracing the development of a cultural perception of trust in techno-fixes reveals a complex and multi-sided history. I claim that the environmental dimension of techno-optimistic discourses requires a critical reconsideration of the ideological underpinnings of Silicon Valley, described as the “Californian Ideology” by Barbrook and Cameron (Citation1996). I will demonstrate how ecomodernism, including its belief that human progress can be “decoupled” from environmental decline, allows us to better understand, and critique, the environmental ideology of Silicon Valley.
I will first expand on contemporary ecomodernism and present my thesis that “decoupling” nature from culture has come to underlie whole-systems thinking in contemporary techno-optimistic discourse. In the following three sections, I highlight a few historical moments to demonstrate the development of the cultural perception of techno-fixes, specifically as a means of managing the environment. I show how whole-systems thinking became popularized by the Whole Earth community, got incorporated in environmental debates through the Limits to Growth report and is reflected in cyberutopian dreams about immaterial societies. Building on my necessarily brief history, I argue that techno-fixes can be strategically presented as ideal solutions if the world and environment are imagined as simple systems and technology as immaterial and harmless. Finally, I return to contemporary US tech culture and argue that it is shaped by, and co-shapes, the ideology of ecomodernism in which nature and culture are decoupled. I conclude that this worldview expresses itself today in corporate visions, resulting in a false hope about how to innovate our way out of the climate crisis…
Eminently worth reading in full (if in the end, as for me, less as a wholesale rejection of techno-optimism and systems thinking than as a cautionary counterweight): “Fixing the earth: whole-systems thinking in Silicon Valley’s environmental ideology,” from @WeAreTandF.
(image above: source)
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As we tangle with tech, we might pause to remember a man who bridged our understanding of the systems of the world from one paradigm to another: Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS; he died in this date in 1944. An astrophysicist, mathematician, and philosopher of science known for his work on the motion, distribution, evolution and structure of stars, Eddington is probably best remembered for his relationship to Einstein: he was, via a series of widely-published articles, the primary “explainer” of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to the English-speaking world; and he was, in 1919, the leader of the experimental team that used observations of a solar eclipse to confirm the theory.
“We all live in each other’s shadow”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post, Nathan Gardels, editor of Noema Magazine, on a new book by Children of a Modest Star, “A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences” by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman…
Globalization was about markets, information flows and technology crossing borders. The planetary is about borders crossing us, embedding and entangling human civilization in its habitat. That, in a nutshell, is the core thesis of a new paradigm-shifting book by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman titled “Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for the Age of Crises.”
The concept of planetarity describes a new condition in which humans recognize not only that we are not above and apart from “nature,” but that we are only beginning to understand the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems.
“If Copernicus’s heliocentrism represented the First Great Decentering, displacing the Earth from the center of the heavens, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection the Second Great Decentering, then the emergence of the concept of the Planetary represents the Third Great Decentering, and the one that hits closest to home, supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things,” Blake and Gilman write.
As further argued by the authors in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume, “the Planetary as a scientific concept focuses on the Earth as an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration between various biogeochemical systems and living beings — both human and non-human. Drawing on earth system science and systems biology, this holistic understanding is being enabled by new planetary-scale technologies of perception – a rapidly maturing technosphere of sensors, networks, and supercomputers that collectively are rendering the planetary system increasingly visible, comprehensible and foreseeable. This recently-evolved smart exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer — is fostering an unprecedented form of planetary sapience.”
The open question is how, and if, human governance in the late-stage Anthropocene can align with the knowledge we are now attaining.
Paradoxically, planetary-scale connectivity is also what divides us. Convergence entails divergence because the universalizing and rationalizing logic of technology and economics that ties the world together operates in a wholly different dimension than the ethos of politics and culture, rooted in emotion and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind.
While the emergent world-spanning cognitive apparatus may be sprouting the synapses of a synchronized planetary intelligence, it clashes with the tribal ingathering of nations and civilizations that remain anchored in their historical and spatial identity.
Consequently, this new domain of encompassing awareness is — so far — as much the terrain of contestation as of common ground…
[ Gardel unpacks Blake’s and Gilman’s proposition, which would devolve some decision-making on some issues, even as it globalized others. By way of addressing the Herculean challenge of creating the equitable, workable global system for addressing global challenges they [propose– a task made the more difficult by the divergence in values discussed yesterday— he invokes an episode from American history…]
… At the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, America was morphing from an agricultural, largely rural society into an urban and industrial one. Cultural norms and familiar ways of living were in upheaval. Political institutions that had become dysfunctional were challenged — not so unlike the disruptive transition to digital society and planetarity we are experiencing at present.
The turmoil of transition in those days gave birth to what became known as the Progressive Era. Its progenitors sought to address the new social concerns of a more complex society — working hours and safety conditions in newfangled factories, women’s suffrage, public health exposure from mass food processing, poor urban infrastructure from housing to water and electricity, the concentration of power in the railroad and banking trusts as well as exploitative private utility companies.
The Progressive Era response in the American states was to move in two directions at once. The movement promoted direct democracy whereby citizens could make laws and enforce accountability directly, skirting the corrupt and bought-off legislators of the patronage machines, through the citizens’ ballot initiative, the referendum and the recall of elected officials. At the same time, elected Progressive governors delegated authority to nonpartisan experts for commissions that regulated commerce, banking, railroads and electric utilities on behalf of the public interest. Professional city managers, unelected but accountable to direct democracy and the elected officials who appointed them, came into being for the first time to competently administer ever more complex urban environments.
In time, the reforms that resulted from this pairing of citizen engagement and technocracy percolated up to the national level into institutions such as the Interstate Commerce Commission or the Food and Drug Administration and led to the abolition of child labor, the eight-hour working day and women’s right to vote.
The point of this brief detour into American history is not to suggest the unworkable proposition of direct democracy at a planetary scale, but simply to say that it is well within the capacity of the political imagination to marry modes of consent with delegated authority in a way that confers legitimacy.
The paradigm shift and governing innovations Blake and Gilman propose in “Children of a Modest Star” are no less realizable over time than what has come before because, now just as then, changing circumstances demand it…
A paradigm shift from globalization to planetary governance? “The Third Great Decentering,” @NoemaMag @JonathanSBlake @nils_gilman.
* Irish proverb (in Gaelic, “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine”), quoted by Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin
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As we think systemically, we might recall that on this date in 1998 The Price Is Right aired its milestone 5,000th episode (the longest-running game show in history, it’s over 10,000 episodes to date, and still chugging along). Every prize given away on that episode was a car.
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